Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1195

1195. But what a divine difference there is between the above-mentioned being and the "Adam" appearing today (the human being at the terrestrial human stage)! The modern terrestrial human being presses buttons, and the elements obey its slightest command. By pressing buttons it manufactures machines that, by pressing other buttons, carry it over the Earth, over continents and seas, up through the air, above the clouds, through the spheres, as well as under the foaming surface of the oceans. It lays steel tracks through mountains, stone and granite. It weighs the planets, follows the orbits of the suns, analyses the substances of the stars and measures distances in space. In truth it begins to follow the Godhead's thoughts, while the "sleeping Adam" of today (the plant being) has as yet merely an inkling of the warmth of the light and still slumbers sweetly in the dreamland of bliss, the "Garden of Eden", in which there is no "weeping and gnashing of teeth", where pain and suffering have not as yet become awake day-conscious and where "death" is present only as an experience predicted for he that eats of the "tree of knowledge", and the being thus possesses this state of bliss, this terrain of "paradise" solely on the basis of its total ignorance of the physical plane and the ineptitude of its senses on this plane.